the smaller your instruction set, the higher the chance that the compiler is actually better at optimizing than you are
Unless the authors of the only compiler for your ISA maintain it as a hobby and aren't interested enough in optimization to quit their day jobs. Case in point: cc65.
If you are on an 8 Bit MCU, speed is not that critical, or you would use a larger and faster MCU.
When you want to add a new feature to hundreds of thousands or even millions of devices in the field, have fun recalling them to install "a larger and faster MCU."
What you say may be true of x86, x86-64, ARMv4-7, and AArch64, which get the most attention from compiler authors. On an 8-bit microcontroller, assembly tuned specifically for a particular ISA's available addressing modes can handily beat C++. Some ISAs, such as 6502, prefer a set of parallel arrays instead of an array of structures.
It's not unreasonable to imagine that the ongoing proliferation of embedded doodads would spur that on, but it's a stretch to imagine that it's for devices for which there is nothing but an assembler.
For systems using a 6502 family CPU, there is a C compiler. But it doesn't optimize much, and the 6502 architecture isn't well suited for efficient execution of C anyway. That's why even though a few modern-day NES games are written in C, most are written in assembly language.
I agree that it's strange that hi-tech jobs can't be done remotely in this day and age because management wants warm butts in seats
Some high-tech engineering jobs require specialized equipment, such as the developer board for an FPGA or a game console, that must be stored in a location more secure than someone's apartment.
So what is expected of a developer in a field where free software is by far the exception? Commercial video games are non-free far more often than not, as are player software for rented movies and (U.S.) income tax return preparation software.
Last question first. Laptops can't receive phone calls. Kind of handy at times.
That's why I currently carry a laptop and a dumbphone: the latter to receive calls and the former for everything else. One advantage of carrying a laptop and dumbphone over a smartphone and external keyboard is that each is closer to ideal for its job. The other is that their combined monthly bill is less than that of a smartphone because carriers are less likely to insist on a data plan.
Continuous integration is in addition to local testing of local incremental builds of a local branch, not a replacement for it. Just because Netscape and Mozilla pioneered CI with the "Tinderbox" system doesn't mean engineers weren't also building Gecko on their own machines.
BTW, for all intents and purposes, Macs are consoles. They're not even worthy of PC status.
I disagree. Macs are personal computers because the person who owns it controls what computing is done on it, even down to compiling apps from source code. What game console runs Xcode or even anything remotely like Xcode?
But back to topic: arth1 meant "politically correct", not "personal computer". He perceived "publisher" as a politically correct synonym for "server", unaware of its adtech sense "operator of a site on which an advertisement is placed". If ad networks are breached more often than publishers, measures to protect yourself from breached ad networks have a better payoff than measures to protect yourself from breached publishers.
I just tried text selection with a Nexus 7 (2012) tablet, the latest version of Chrome, and a ZAGGkeys Flex Bluetooth keyboard. On a web page, outside of editable elements (<input> and <textarea>), the arrow keys scroll the screen rather than moving the cursor, and Shift+arrow keys do nothing. Arrow keys move the cursor only inside editable elements. Shift+Arrow keys control the selection only in editable elements or if the user has already long-pressed the screen to activate "Text selection" mode. And in "Text selection" mode, Shift+arrow keys can move only the end of the selection, not the start. Without the ability to use arrow keys, I have to long-press the screen to use "Text selection" mode, and I have found that using this mode is a lot slower than using a mouse or trackpad. Furthermore, the author's name and article title are often hyperlinks, and when they are, long-pressing them shows the "Open link in new tab" menu rather than starting a text selection. I find that I often have to start the selection elsewhere and then move the start and end of the selection to the text that I want to copy.
Besides, if you have to carry a USB or Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, then what's the big advantage of that over using a laptop?
There's little reason for a web browser to access anything but the profile and its download directory.
Looking through the permissions that Chrome for Android has, I can see a few little reasons:
Obviously, a web browser needs to access the Internet.
WebRTC requires microphone and camera access but allows things like voice search, product lookup by barcode, reverse image search, and voice and video chat.
Geolocation API requires location access but allows not having to key in your street address every time when looking for stores near you.
Web Notifications requires receiving cloud to device messages but allows a user to choose to let a web application get the user's attention.
A picture viewer doesn't need to write to disk
Unless it offers a feature for the user to rotate an image by 90 degrees and save the fact that it was rotated. (The cosine transform used in JPEG allows lossless rotation of images whose size is a multiple of the macroblock size, usually 16x16 pixels.)
In prescriptivist theory, comparative words such as "more" or "increasingly" cannot be used with binary state words such as "unique" or "useless". But in practice, when a comparative word is used with a binary state word, the binary state word takes on the meaning of closeness to that state. So "more unique" means "closer to unique", and "increasingly useless" means "increasingly close to useless".
In ad industry jargon, the publisher hosts an article, and the ad network hosts the ads embedded in the article. Both the publisher and the ad network operate servers. What's a more readily understood term meaning "site on which an advertisement is placed"?
Blocking ads doesn't directly block breach of a publisher. But I imagine that breach of a publisher is far less likely than breach of the ad network that the publisher uses because the return on investment for breaching an ad network is greater than that for breaching a publisher. A user who blocks ads is immune to breach of an ad network.
There are adequate [application whitelisting] solutions, but they raise the bar in terms of the expertise, expense, and effort required. Even if a company addressed the "expense" issue by releasing a consumer-priced whitelisting application for Windows, there is no clear way to eliminate the other requirements.
I know of a couple consumer whitelist tools for Windows. One is the SuperShield feature of PC Matic. Another is the SmartScreen feature of Internet Explorer since 9 and Windows since 8, which prompts the user to delete programs that are "not commonly downloaded". But I've read complaints on forums that the EV code signing certificate needed to immediately pass SmartScreen for a new release can be too expensive for part-time developers.
"6. Use an adblocker" makes a breach far less likely because ad networks are by far the most common vector for breaches of ostensibly legitimate websites. Furthermore, "2. Keep your browsers and OS up-to-date" makes "drive-by malware" far less likely to start executing.
Antivirus software that detects apps known to be harmful is a form of blacklisting. But as a general rule, blacklisting is considered less secure than whitelisting. An antivirus using whitelisting, such as PC Matic, allows only known good apps to run.
The obvious problem with this approach is who defines the set of known good programs. In a corporate environment, an IT department has the resources to review the programs on which employees rely. But a home PC owner who isn't quite a PC expert may not feel qualified to do this, instead delegating review to a trusted party. This has led to cases of rent-seeking, where a gatekeeper demands payment from each developer to review each app.
1) open source for your claim in browser. 2) select "copy link location" 3) write your response, pasting in the link location.
And discover that while you were viewing the other tab, the browser had purged the page from memory and reloaded it from the network, in the process blowing away the reply that you were writing. In my experience, browsers for desktop operating systems make an effort to keep the DOM in memory, falling back to the page file if needed, whereas browsers for mobile operating systems are far more willing to lose the user's unsubmitted data in response to a memory pressure notification from the operating system. This is true even between a laptop with 1 GB of RAM and a tablet with 1 GB of RAM.
In my experience, switching the keyboard among lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols 1, and symbols 2 pages to format a citation is far more painful on a 5 to 8 inch touch screen than on even a netbook's keyboard. Both HTML and BBCode are hindered by < and > (or [ and ]), ", and = being scattered among keyboard pages.
And when I make a citation in a wiki or similar, I try to make the citation resistant to link rot by copying the author's name, the title of the article, the title of the site it appeared on, and the date it was published. This requires several trips back and forth between the source and the response, and these back-and-forth trips are a lot easier with double-click-drag, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+Tab, than with the fiddly long-press gymnastics that I need to use to select text on my Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab A tablet.
What's happening is that Facebook is paying ISPs to make Facebook and Wikipedia available without charge, while billing people for data when accessing any other site. It's a paywall imposed by the ISP to which the viewer subscribes, not by the operators of completing sites.
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the smaller your instruction set, the higher the chance that the compiler is actually better at optimizing than you are
Unless the authors of the only compiler for your ISA maintain it as a hobby and aren't interested enough in optimization to quit their day jobs. Case in point: cc65.
If you are on an 8 Bit MCU, speed is not that critical, or you would use a larger and faster MCU.
When you want to add a new feature to hundreds of thousands or even millions of devices in the field, have fun recalling them to install "a larger and faster MCU."
What you say may be true of x86, x86-64, ARMv4-7, and AArch64, which get the most attention from compiler authors. On an 8-bit microcontroller, assembly tuned specifically for a particular ISA's available addressing modes can handily beat C++. Some ISAs, such as 6502, prefer a set of parallel arrays instead of an array of structures.
It's not unreasonable to imagine that the ongoing proliferation of embedded doodads would spur that on, but it's a stretch to imagine that it's for devices for which there is nothing but an assembler.
For systems using a 6502 family CPU, there is a C compiler. But it doesn't optimize much, and the 6502 architecture isn't well suited for efficient execution of C anyway. That's why even though a few modern-day NES games are written in C, most are written in assembly language.
the balance are networking (45-pct) and old fashioned poaching (45-pct)
Would getting a CCNA help with the "networking" part?
I agree that it's strange that hi-tech jobs can't be done remotely in this day and age because management wants warm butts in seats
Some high-tech engineering jobs require specialized equipment, such as the developer board for an FPGA or a game console, that must be stored in a location more secure than someone's apartment.
You miss out on me because I'm not permitted by my current contract to post anything on github.
No, you miss out on a job because you could not negotiate the "we own what you make in your free time" clause out of your contract.
So what is expected of a developer in a field where free software is by far the exception? Commercial video games are non-free far more often than not, as are player software for rented movies and (U.S.) income tax return preparation software.
If only Twitter supported 2-factor authentication methods other than SMS to a unique phone number...
Last question first. Laptops can't receive phone calls. Kind of handy at times.
That's why I currently carry a laptop and a dumbphone: the latter to receive calls and the former for everything else. One advantage of carrying a laptop and dumbphone over a smartphone and external keyboard is that each is closer to ideal for its job. The other is that their combined monthly bill is less than that of a smartphone because carriers are less likely to insist on a data plan.
Continuous integration is in addition to local testing of local incremental builds of a local branch, not a replacement for it. Just because Netscape and Mozilla pioneered CI with the "Tinderbox" system doesn't mean engineers weren't also building Gecko on their own machines.
Or decreasing: "SoylentNews editors have shown themselves less useless than Slashdot editors."
BTW, for all intents and purposes, Macs are consoles. They're not even worthy of PC status.
I disagree. Macs are personal computers because the person who owns it controls what computing is done on it, even down to compiling apps from source code. What game console runs Xcode or even anything remotely like Xcode?
But back to topic: arth1 meant "politically correct", not "personal computer". He perceived "publisher" as a politically correct synonym for "server", unaware of its adtech sense "operator of a site on which an advertisement is placed". If ad networks are breached more often than publishers, measures to protect yourself from breached ad networks have a better payoff than measures to protect yourself from breached publishers.
I just tried text selection with a Nexus 7 (2012) tablet, the latest version of Chrome, and a ZAGGkeys Flex Bluetooth keyboard. On a web page, outside of editable elements (<input> and <textarea>), the arrow keys scroll the screen rather than moving the cursor, and Shift+arrow keys do nothing. Arrow keys move the cursor only inside editable elements. Shift+Arrow keys control the selection only in editable elements or if the user has already long-pressed the screen to activate "Text selection" mode. And in "Text selection" mode, Shift+arrow keys can move only the end of the selection, not the start. Without the ability to use arrow keys, I have to long-press the screen to use "Text selection" mode, and I have found that using this mode is a lot slower than using a mouse or trackpad. Furthermore, the author's name and article title are often hyperlinks, and when they are, long-pressing them shows the "Open link in new tab" menu rather than starting a text selection. I find that I often have to start the selection elsewhere and then move the start and end of the selection to the text that I want to copy.
Besides, if you have to carry a USB or Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, then what's the big advantage of that over using a laptop?
There's little reason for a web browser to access anything but the profile and its download directory.
Looking through the permissions that Chrome for Android has, I can see a few little reasons:
A picture viewer doesn't need to write to disk
Unless it offers a feature for the user to rotate an image by 90 degrees and save the fact that it was rotated. (The cosine transform used in JPEG allows lossless rotation of images whose size is a multiple of the macroblock size, usually 16x16 pixels.)
Let me explain this usage:
In prescriptivist theory, comparative words such as "more" or "increasingly" cannot be used with binary state words such as "unique" or "useless". But in practice, when a comparative word is used with a binary state word, the binary state word takes on the meaning of closeness to that state. So "more unique" means "closer to unique", and "increasingly useless" means "increasingly close to useless".
In ad industry jargon, the publisher hosts an article, and the ad network hosts the ads embedded in the article. Both the publisher and the ad network operate servers. What's a more readily understood term meaning "site on which an advertisement is placed"?
I agree. But in practice, how can an inexperienced PC owner understand how to enumerate goodness?
Blocking ads doesn't directly block breach of a publisher. But I imagine that breach of a publisher is far less likely than breach of the ad network that the publisher uses because the return on investment for breaching an ad network is greater than that for breaching a publisher. A user who blocks ads is immune to breach of an ad network.
There are adequate [application whitelisting] solutions, but they raise the bar in terms of the expertise, expense, and effort required. Even if a company addressed the "expense" issue by releasing a consumer-priced whitelisting application for Windows, there is no clear way to eliminate the other requirements.
I know of a couple consumer whitelist tools for Windows. One is the SuperShield feature of PC Matic. Another is the SmartScreen feature of Internet Explorer since 9 and Windows since 8, which prompts the user to delete programs that are "not commonly downloaded". But I've read complaints on forums that the EV code signing certificate needed to immediately pass SmartScreen for a new release can be too expensive for part-time developers.
"6. Use an adblocker" makes a breach far less likely because ad networks are by far the most common vector for breaches of ostensibly legitimate websites. Furthermore, "2. Keep your browsers and OS up-to-date" makes "drive-by malware" far less likely to start executing.
Antivirus software that detects apps known to be harmful is a form of blacklisting. But as a general rule, blacklisting is considered less secure than whitelisting. An antivirus using whitelisting, such as PC Matic, allows only known good apps to run.
The obvious problem with this approach is who defines the set of known good programs. In a corporate environment, an IT department has the resources to review the programs on which employees rely. But a home PC owner who isn't quite a PC expert may not feel qualified to do this, instead delegating review to a trusted party. This has led to cases of rent-seeking, where a gatekeeper demands payment from each developer to review each app.
Bruce Schneier explains further
fiddly long-press gymnastics that I need to use to select text on my Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab A tablet
So plug a standard usb keyboard into your phone. What's the big deal?
The USB keyboard will help little or not at all with selecting text to copy from the source.
1) open source for your claim in browser.
2) select "copy link location"
3) write your response, pasting in the link location.
And discover that while you were viewing the other tab, the browser had purged the page from memory and reloaded it from the network, in the process blowing away the reply that you were writing. In my experience, browsers for desktop operating systems make an effort to keep the DOM in memory, falling back to the page file if needed, whereas browsers for mobile operating systems are far more willing to lose the user's unsubmitted data in response to a memory pressure notification from the operating system. This is true even between a laptop with 1 GB of RAM and a tablet with 1 GB of RAM.
In my experience, switching the keyboard among lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols 1, and symbols 2 pages to format a citation is far more painful on a 5 to 8 inch touch screen than on even a netbook's keyboard. Both HTML and BBCode are hindered by < and > (or [ and ]), ", and = being scattered among keyboard pages.
And when I make a citation in a wiki or similar, I try to make the citation resistant to link rot by copying the author's name, the title of the article, the title of the site it appeared on, and the date it was published. This requires several trips back and forth between the source and the response, and these back-and-forth trips are a lot easier with double-click-drag, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+Tab, than with the fiddly long-press gymnastics that I need to use to select text on my Nexus 7 or Galaxy Tab A tablet.
What's happening is that Facebook is paying ISPs to make Facebook and Wikipedia available without charge, while billing people for data when accessing any other site. It's a paywall imposed by the ISP to which the viewer subscribes, not by the operators of completing sites.